


The Dawn Don't Rescue Me No More

by Epigone



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Gen, Psychotherapy, Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-12
Updated: 2007-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-12 23:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/130489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epigone/pseuds/Epigone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At home, before the war, his job had been to transform pain. Now he could only give it back.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dawn Don't Rescue Me No More

**Author's Note:**

> **Rating and Warnings** : PG-13. Spoilers for the series finale.  
>  **Disclaimer** : I only _wish_ Sidney and the good people of the 4077th were mine. The rest of the hospital characters, however, are mine.  
>  **Acknowledgments and Notes** : Thanks to Abyssinia for a lightning-fast beta, lots of reassurance, and her willingness to listen to me gush about Sidney Freedman; to Malograntum Vitiorum, for knowing _Macbeth_ inside and out; and to furies, who betaed brilliantly for the psychiatry and didn't let me take any easy ways out. Thanks also to the guys and girls over at the little_details community on LJ, who always save my ass. This story was written for the Altered Mental States Ficathon, hosted [here](http://hawkfromhandsaw.livejournal.com), off the following prompt from Peter Shaffer's _Equus_ : _The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills - like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. Normal is the indispensable murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest._ That doesn't belong to me, and (obviously) neither do any of the Shakespeare or Eliot quotations; nor does the title, which comes from The Band's song "It Makes No Difference." Finally, thanks to Raven, who ran a ficathon that I couldn't _not_ write for, and did it with efficiency and grace under pressure. She is my big damn hero.

_"I thought hard for us all—my only swerving...."_  
\--William Stafford, "Traveling Through the Dark"

In the hour between dinner and the beginning of evening rounds, Sidney retreated to his office, hung a sign on the closed door that read "Patient's disposition: antisocial," and opened a bottle of Scotch that he'd been saving for most of the war. Putting up the sign, he felt a reckless sense of irresponsibility, but he knew there was no reason for it. The ward nurses had gradually become accustomed to his sense of humor, and two of the other doctors had adopted his half-joke of keeping a daily chart of his own neuroses. Meanwhile, patients rarely came to his office at all, an uncomfortably narrow cranny that had been a closet in a former life—before the war, when Ward D was nothing more than the gymnasium of a state-of-the-art secondary-school campus established by occupying US troops in '45.

There was no one who would be alarmed if he acted out a little. So Sidney didn't feel especially self-conscious about drinking straight from the bottle, since the glass he usually kept in his desk drawer had gone missing again. He made a mental note to talk to Captain Gilmore, a psychiatrist newly transferred to the hospital from a KO team at the front. Gilmore had his own share of combat-fatigue symptoms, which he liked to treat with a shot of bourbon in the evenings.

Tonight, opening Corporal Arthur Morelli's file, Sidney saw the appeal of that regimen. Morelli had first arrived at the hospital last December, claiming to be Harry S. Truman. He'd been treated successfully, and ultimately he was released and assigned to a support function behind the lines. According to his file, he had performed so well that in April he'd been reassigned to a front-line unit.

Now it was early July, and last night Morelli had returned to the hospital. His first words had been "Ike's a dirty liar. _I_ 'm the one who went to Korea." Sidney hated repeaters, rare though they were, with a doctor's passionate and personal despair at a familiar face. Still, he'd been prepared to take Morelli back, to retread the minefield of identity with him.

But then had come tonight's dinner, where Morelli stood up in the middle of the dining hall, gesticulating with a fork, and launched into an energetic campaign speech. (Clearly he wasn't as publicly resigned to losing the Democratic nomination as the true Truman.) And in his frustration, in his failure, Sidney had raised his voice at Morelli—not quite a shout, but not far enough off to be comfortable. When dinner ended, he'd started the process to have the case transferred to Caleb. When he was this fruitlessly angry, Sidney could be no help to Morelli.

Sidney was just beginning to feel the warmth spreading in his extremities, and regretfully recognizing it as a sign that he couldn't drink any more, when someone knocked on the door. Caleb's knock. He sat up in his chair, cleared his throat, and said as naturally as possible, "Yes?"

"Are you all right in there?" Caleb's voice, concern underlain with a treacherous current of amusement.

Sidney liked Captain Caleb Markham, and more importantly he trusted him. Caleb had been conscripted under the Doctor's Draft Act, but a few months after they met he'd confided to Sidney that he'd planned to enlist anyway. Sidney had been a member of Young Americans for a Lasting Peace since World War Two, but by that time he and Caleb were already friendly; Sidney liked him too much for a knee-jerk recoil. Caleb thought differently, that was all. He'd come to Korea believing he could make a difference, and to his credit he still believed that. It would have been easy to write him off as naïve, but he'd seen as much of the carnage as anyone else. In fact, he'd been at the hospital longer than Sidney. Good Protestant that he was, he simply chose, quietly and without fanfare, to keep the faith—not in war, but in meaningfulness.

"I'm fine," Sidney said. "Come in, the sign doesn't apply to you." As the door opened, he lifted the bottle fractionally and said, "Just healing myself."

Caleb stood on the threshold, half-smiling.

"Ahh, the Gilmore Method," he said sagely.

"A good doctor is always learning from his colleagues," replied Sidney. "Is this about Morelli? I can give him to Murphy if you'd prefer."

Caleb raised an eyebrow and said, "Murphy claims that Robinson—you know, the kid with mutism—is taking more than his fair share of time, so…."

"I'm not convinced it's not Murphy taking up Robinson's time," said Sidney wryly, "now that he's got a guaranteed captive audience." Captain Murphy wasn't a bad doctor, but he seemed more interested in being a good orator. Gilmore theorized that it was because he was the son of a Catholic priest back in Connecticut; that in preaching psychiatric dogma to patients he was, like a good disciple, merely emulating Our Father Who Art in Hartford. Sidney sighed, thinking not for the first time that the Army didn't pay him enough to manage these people, and said, "I'm sorry to hand him off to you, I really am, but keeping his interests at heart—"

"Please." Caleb waved a hand. "Even without him you have the heaviest caseload of all of us. I'm happy to take him. We get along well."

Sidney felt a rush of affection for him. There were few patients with whom Caleb didn't get along well.

"I owe you a favor," Sidney said. "So then what brings you by? Just a house call?"

Caleb glanced back, just perceptibly, at the sign on the door. "Nooo… unless you need one. We've got a new admission. Thinks he's our dearly departed General MacArthur."

Sidney blinked, then started to laugh. "Oh, very good. You had me going for a second. I get it, I get it: good old Morelli, you send him out and he comes right back."

"I'm not kidding." Caleb came father into the room and stood before Sidney's desk. With his hands folded behind him and his broad shoulders held back, he looked more like a soldier than most of their patients. "He's being processed right now. He's from the 25th Infantry." Caleb paused and then asked, "That was the division you worked with, wasn't it? When you first came over?"

Sidney felt all of his half-hearted amusement evaporate. This backstory seemed too elaborate for a joke. They'd seen a number of men from the 25th in the past month, ever since the division had repulsed a heavy Chinese assault on Seoul in late May.

"Yes," he said. "They were good kids"—and, it didn't need to be said, most of them were dead, reassigned, or home by now. He forced himself to laugh again, knowing that a sense of humor was the only possible sense of perspective here. "If I didn't know better, I'd think this whole war was a stunt on _Candid Camera_."

Caleb laughed with him, uncertainly. "They're taking him to his room—apparently he hasn't had a good night's rest in weeks—but in the morning he'll need seeing to. Murphy's got the lightest caseload right now, by the numbers, but there's the Robinson problem."

Sidney looked at the sheaf of papers in Caleb's hand. "That's his file?" When Caleb nodded, Sidney said, "All right, let me have a look. I'll pick the lucky doctor."

Caleb gave him a small, conspiratorial smile. "Sorry, Sid. Next time I'll try to bear good news."

"I won't hold my breath," Sidney said, wearily but warmly. Caleb passed him the folder and left him to it, closing the door on his way out.

Sidney opened the file and began perusing it. His whole body ached with fatigue, but as he flipped through Private Neil Fleming's record he began to lean forward. There was something different about the case. For one thing, dissociative states of this magnitude and specificity were rare, even in front-line soldiers. But it was more than that. Men who became convinced that they were of higher rank than they were, or who assumed the personalities of upper-echelon officers, were often career military. If not, they usually had military aspirations. But Fleming's record gave no indication of service above and beyond the call, of any striving for recognition. At twenty-five he was an older soldier, a late draftee from the end of last year—

And that was another oddity. Sidney had treated one other man who believed he was MacArthur, but that had been near the beginning of the war, shortly after Sidney had been transferred to the hospital. By contrast, Fleming had never even been in Korea at the same time as MacArthur. To assume the identity of a general—the supreme commander of the UN forces, no less—was to invest oneself with an almost mystical authority. It was a claim to power by the powerless; that was the usual impulse behind this kind of dissociation. But Fleming, a lowly private, had found it necessary in July 1953 to become a man who'd had no military clout since April 1951.

Sidney was so absorbed in his reading that he missed Caleb's knock, and was only alerted to his presence when Caleb cracked the door open and said softly, "Sorry to bother you, again—"

Without raising his head, Sidney said, "No, listen, I'm going to take Fleming. It's the least I can do if I'm handing over Morelli. Anyway, it's an interesting case. Have you looked at this? He was drafted _last year_ —"

"This isn't about Fleming," said Caleb.

"I'm beginning to feel perpetually one step behind," said Sidney. "If you tell me we've got Ridgway now—"

Caleb, usually a patient man, interrupted again. "We just got a call from the 4077th."

Sidney stopped. He could imagine how he looked from the door: still hunched over the file as if nothing had changed, but his shoulders drawing in slightly, his hands ceasing to move. He knew before Caleb said anything more. He knew because all summer he'd had this electric sense of events coming to a head, a convergence of heat and skirmishes like a fever reaching its pitch. Now came the breaking.

"Colonel Potter asked for you," continued Caleb, when Sidney said nothing. "He doesn't want some divisional psychiatrist. He needs us to send somebody down to evacuate—"

"Hawkeye," said Sidney. For almost three years, he'd been waiting for this call.

"Captain Pierce," said Caleb. "Yes." Sidney looked up at him. He was standing in the doorway, one hand resting against the jamb. He seemed somehow fragile, poised there on the threshold of the outside world, unable to hold it back. "He had some kind of breakdown. The colonel didn't give many details. Something with a jeep."

"Send an orderly," said Sidney.

Caleb made as if to leave. Then he hesitated and said, "You've done good for him before. And who knows, it might not even be as serious as they think."

Sidney folded his hands together on top of Fleming's file. They looked clumsy, clean, undoctorly.

"I'm sure it is," he said. "Send an orderly, please. Have someone notify me as soon as they get in."

Caleb nodded, with a sympathetic tightening of the mouth. As Sidney watched him go, all he could think was that he should have saved more of the Scotch.

***

Hawkeye woke up in the dark, in the passenger seat of a jeep, to a voice in his ear saying, "It's time."

He peered into the darkness. His heart thudded painfully; he could feel his pulse in his ears.

"What?" he said, trying to sit, to swim up through the layers of sleep, the backwash of panic. The last thing he remembered, _he_ had been driving the jeep. He'd gone to get a drink. He couldn't imagine he'd had so much that he needed someone to drive him home.

"We're here, Captain," said the voice, and Hawkeye turned wildly to find a man he didn't know in the driver's seat.

"That would be more helpful," said Hawkeye, flinging out an arm to encompass the void, "if there were some _here_ here."

"Korea at four a.m.," said a familiar voice. "The dark night of the soul."

Hawkeye looked up, and there he was: Sidney, standing in the night, opening the door for him. Very much himself. Hawkeye stumbled out of the jeep, all but fell into him, and held on. " _Sidney_ ," he said, He could feel Sidney stiffen, then relax.

When they came apart, Hawkeye started laughing. "Sorry. Sorry! They tell me I get overly affectionate when I'm drunk. I think it made him uncomfortable, 'cause he was eager to kick me out." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the strange man. "You think he'd welcome the attention, but no, it's just 'Hurry up, please, it's time.'"

"Did he say that?" said Sidney. "What did he mean by that, do you think?"

"Last call," said Hawkeye. " _Obviously_."

Sidney looked at him, head cocked to one side. "Do you think so? I always thought that was a line from a poem."

"I think," said Hawkeye with exaggerated patience, "that it would probably make more sense for a bartender to be announcing last call than reciting poetry."

"He's not really in a bar, though, is he?" asked Sidney gently.

Hawkeye looked at Sidney, then at the man. When he looked back at Sidney, he felt the ground lurch under him. "He's in a jeep," he said softly, not knowing what he meant. "I forget." He saw the officers' club and the jeep run together like watercolors, the gleam of shot glasses and the glare of headlights. The gleam of bottled blood and the glare of overhead surgery lamps. The officers' club and the operating room, OC and OR.

"I know you do," said Sidney. "'Hurry up, please, it's time' is from a poem. Do you remember it? 'When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said— / I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, / HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME.'" Sidney gave a quick smile at that, as if he'd surprised himself—unusual for him. "I'm not sure it's your time to be demobbed yet, Hawkeye. I think you still have things to do here."

Hawkeye found that he didn't know how to answer. He felt overwhelmed by affection for Sidney for no reason that he could find. He had an impulse to embrace him again, but then Sidney was saying:

"Let's go inside, shall we?"

"Inside where?" asked Hawkeye.

Sidney touched him on the arm and steered him away from the jeep.

"The hospital."

It looked like no hospital Hawkeye had ever been in. Sidney produced a set of keys and took him into a side building, slightly smaller than the one outside which the jeep was parked. To Hawkeye's relief there was no OR. No patients in sight. It was late, certainly, but that didn't explain why there was no one in post-op—no post-op, in fact.

"This isn't Tokyo General," Hawkeye said, but he didn't need to ask. He had come to know it, as suddenly and surely as he knew that the jeep was a different jeep, and that he was afraid of the impenetrable darkness of all his lost time. "This is your hospital, isn't it."

"Thanks for the promotion, but no," said Sidney. "It is my ward, though."

"Why?" asked Hawkeye plaintively.

Sidney, now two paces ahead of him, didn't look back. "Why is it my ward? Some people think I'm reasonably good at what I do. Why are you here?" His shoulders lifted in a shrug. "That's an existential questions. Not my province. I'm a psychiatrist, not a philosopher."

Ahead of them stretched a narrow, dimly lit hallway, with outer windows on the left and a row of mostly closed doors on the right. It ended in a blank wall about a hundred yards in front of them. To the right was another hallway, with a new hall branching out at the end of its left wall, so that Hawkeye envisioned the inside of the building as a U shape, with the main door at the left corner of the bottom bar.

Just past the entrance to the right-hand hall was one of the few open doorways in sight. The thick metal door stood ajar, its double bolts unlatched. In its discreet, almost casual position against the wall, it was like the silhouette of a young dandy, like the one in the Noel Gay showtune: _I'm leaning on the lamppost at the corner of the street in case a certain little lady comes by…._

Hawkeye clicked his tongue and said, "Bad luck, pal; only officers and gentlemen here."

"Sorry?" asked Sidney. He turned to look back.

"Not your fault more women don't bug out, Sidney." Hawkeye smiled with a benevolent air. "Do you think the crazy kind of bug-out derives from the same root as the military bug-out? You think the Army's that self-aware?" And then, grasping at another thought, desperate to share: "Also there's 'combat fatigue' and its close cousin 'combat fatigues,' a parallel that I'm sure hasn't escaped you." He lowered his head and half-closed his eyes in a preening, almost flirtatious gesture, one that used to work wonders on nurses. "I mean, you know Latin, you're familiar with linguistics—you're a doctor. It's all right. We're all doctors here."

Sidney came to him and put a hand on his back.

"Mostly we're patients here, Hawkeye," he said. "And it is all right." Hawkeye stepped away from the touch, so abruptly that he almost backed into the wall. Sidney said, "Let's get you to your room. There'll be plenty of time to talk later."

As they passed the open door, Hawkeye peered into a large, spare hall, a kind of common room judging from the tables covered with board games and half-finished card games. All that abandonment, activity in stasis, had an eerie effect. Intellectually he knew that the patients must be in their rooms for the night, the games waiting to be continued in the morning; but the part of him that was still driving that jeep, dazzled by the darkness, wasn't so sure they hadn't all just disappeared. Or died, which was essentially the same thing.

Just past the common room, on the right, was an alcove that seemed to be some kind of official area, with a few doors against the back wall. One had Sidney's name on it. In the middle of the room sat a desk manned by a young nurse in uniform. As they approached, she looked up and smiled—affectionately at Sidney, cordially at Hawkeye.

"Captain Pierce?" she asked.

"Call me Hawkeye," he said, leaning over with both hands on the desk.

Sidney nodded at the nurse, and she brought out a clipboard. She asked Hawkeye to turn over all his personal possessions, which didn't bother him much since he hadn't brought any, and sometimes felt he no longer had any. Sidney signed him in, and then the nurse produced a neatly folded stack of hospital clothes.

"You can put these on in your room," she said. "An orderly will be by to pick up your own…" She looked at him strangely for a moment. "…clothes. You'll get a receipt. Does all of that make sense?"

Hawkeye gave Sidney a suggestive look and said, "Don't worry, I usually have this effect on nurses. They demand that the clothes come off, we skip right over courtship." He turned the full force of the leer on the nurse, hoping to chip through that cordiality. "They tell me it's the eyes. I have my mother's eyes."

Sidney merely glanced at him sideways and said, "Hmm."

Hawkeye looked at the pile of clothes, topped with a robe not unlike his own, except dark blue rather than red. He saw the nurse's stacked armful for what it was: a way of divesting him of himself. Defiantly he tried to jam his hands into the pockets of his robe, but nothing caught them and they slid down his thighs, over the dull material of his scrubs. The Army had already taken away his robe. Every time he had an OR session, he had to change into this uniform.

Before the orderlies had taken him away tonight—last night, by this time—BJ had gently insisted that Hawkeye remove his bloody scrubs. Hawkeye had been sitting on the ground outside the officers' club with his back against the wall, his hands dangling between his knees; feeling the weight of them like the slabs of beef hung in the kitchen's walk-in meat locker, and trying not to smile or maybe to scream because he understood it, he understood now the whole meat-processing industry of the war, and that morning in the OR when the anesthetist had lowered the mask over his third patient of the day, he had seen a flash of this red-haired kid swinging like a haunch on a hook, like a headless chicken.

BJ had peeled the mask from Hawkeye's face, delicately undoing the ties at the back of his head. Then, opening the door on the jeep's passenger side—an almost chivalrous gesture—he had said, "You need to take off your scrubs, Hawkeye." Hawkeye had said, "Not until you buy me dinner" and clambered into the jeep still dressed for the OR. BJ hadn't laughed, and neither had Hawkeye.

"Captain Pierce?" asked the nurse.

Hawkeye looked at her, then at Sidney. They were waiting for him. Sometimes it seemed the whole war waited for him, held intact only by the weakest of centripetal forces until he stitched it all back together. He swallowed and took the clothes.

"Okay," he said. He smiled and couldn't feel his face. "Lay on, Macduff."

Sidney took him back out to the right. The last door on the hall stood open, waiting for him at the end. It didn't escape Hawkeye that his room was as close to Sidney's office as possible. He felt a wave of embarrassment—at the special concern it showed—but also of gratitude. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to sleep in a room alone.

Between the black of the windows and the glare of the bare ceiling bulbs, the world spun and dissolved on him, a blur of light and dark. Their shadows walked along the walls, and the shadow of the mask crept again over patient #3's face, and Hawkeye closed his eyes and walked the rest of the way to his room blind. A bad idea, he thought ruefully, to be quoting that play in the middle of the night in a strange land. Who knew what you might conjure up. What might come back unbidden.

***

Like a restless child, Hawkeye finally went down for the night at half past five. Afterward, Sidney returned to his office with Hawkeye's file, laid it open on the desk, and didn't read it. He knew it by heart. He sat looking at nothing for the hour and a half before rounds started, listening to the silence. It seemed like the best way to prepare for the task ahead. He imagined that Hawkeye had done this all of last night, lying in the shadows of the Swamp waiting for some reassuring noise. He wouldn't have needed a miracle; no voice from a burning bush, no tongues of flame. It would have been the sound of breathing that he was listening for, the unquenched vital whisper, and BJ's and Charles's snoring would not have been enough.

At seven Sidney went through rounds as usual, checking in on his crop of current patients. Caleb was right: it was a heavy caseload. Between the Seoul assault in May and a number of other localized flare-ups, they'd had a flood of new admissions, and Sidney had taken more than his share. And now there was Hawkeye, and Fleming—both of whom had their first sessions scheduled directly after rounds. Hawkeye needed the sleep, so Sidney went to Fleming's room first.

When he knocked on the door, a deep voice brusquely said, "Come." Sidney went in to find Fleming sitting on the bed: tall, fair-haired, solemn—a young man, but not that young.

"Good morning, Private," said Sidney, watching for a reaction. "Can I call you Neil?"

Fleming arched a little at that, like a cat. "Major Freedman," he said icily, in bare acknowledgement. It wasn't really a general's response to a major, Sidney noted. Fleming's irritation was simply the personal irritation of a man misidentified.

"I'm sorry," said Sidney, coming farther into the room and taking the chair. "Is that not your name?"

"You know who I am," replied Fleming.

Sidney was looking at the bed. His experience with men suffering from these kinds of delusions had taught him there was generally a kind of hyper-militarism in play. These men aspired to higher rank, so they feigned it as best they knew how. They were chronic saluters, they spoke in jargon—and when they arrived here, they made their beds the Army way, hospital corners and all. Fleming's bed was unmade.

"Hmm," said Sidney at length. "General MacArthur?" Off Fleming's nod, he said, "All right, then. Maybe they've given me the wrong file. We'd better start you a new one. We've got your name; how about your place of birth?"

"Little Rock, Arkansas," said Fleming.

"Good," said Sidney, writing it down not in Fleming's record, but in his own notes. First sessions usually proceeded along these lines, with a review of the basics. Lawyerlike, you asked no questions to which you didn't know the factual answers. Of course, with delusional patients it was a little more complicated—and a little more telling, if the patient made up an entirely different biography for himself. Fleming was a New Yorker; it was MacArthur who'd been born in Little Rock.

In the silence, Fleming's composure seemed to be slipping. "Is that all?"

The voice was interesting, too. Sonorous, measured. An odd cadence. Not like a man acting, but like a man orating.

"Not quite," said Sidney. "What about your service number?"

"US-51904747."

Sidney wrote that one down, too. It was the service number of an enlisted man, not a regular-army officer.

"When did you arrive in Korea?"

Anxiety rippled across Fleming's face. After a pause, he said, "December 1952."

Now Sidney realized what it was about the voice. Fleming had indeed been drafted at the end of '52. What that meant was that, unlike many in-country soldiers, he'd been in the States when MacArthur returned home. He'd been there for the ticker-tape parade, and for the address to Congress. His experience had been of MacArthur televised: of a man not in power but in the news. And he'd gone quite far on it. He had the voice down well, the weighty pauses and the jowly enunciation, and he'd even picked up a little of the posture. He wasn't playing MacArthur the general at all. He was simply playing MacArthur the man, and for reasons that Sidney couldn't even begin to fathom.

"All right," said Sidney. "That's very good. That's all I need for now, but I'll come back soon and we'll talk more. About whatever you like."

As he rose to leave, Fleming didn't move. He sat in the same position, watching Sidney without particular interest. Altogether he gave off the impression of being disconnected from his surroundings, as though they had no bearing on him. As if he didn't _believe_ in them, it occurred to Sidney. A kind of existential skepticism.

"One more thing," said Sidney, standing at the door. "You're in a hospital. Do you know where this hospital is? What country?"

Fleming's blank face said it all.

Walking down the corridor, Sidney tried to store that away for later, when he had a moment to himself. Fleming fascinated him, but he had to put him aside for now, because down the hall on the right was Hawkeye. And while the first session with Fleming had been disguisable—readily passed off as a casual introduction—Hawkeye knew that Sidney knew his file inside and out.

An orderly leaving Hawkeye's room held the door open for Sidney. Hawkeye was sitting on the cot against the far wall, staring at his hands. He was entitled to the privileges of rank: he didn't have to share his room, which was designed for two people. Still, last night he had chosen this cot, onto which harsh light angled from the window every morning, rather the one against the near wall. "The farther from the door," he had said, collapsing onto it, barely lucid, "the safer."

As Sidney came in, Hawkeye looked up, and a quickly concealed flash of relief passed over his face. He seemed better than he had been last night, calmer, but also more withdrawn.

"Good morning," Sidney said.

Hawkeye moved his tray of food to clear a place on the bed. On the first day, patients usually ate in their rooms, since the dining hall could be overwhelming. The drawback was that it was more difficult to monitor their consumption during the crucial period; the official line was that psychiatric patients should eat within six to twelve hours of arrival. Judging from the condition of Hawkeye's meal, he'd taken about one bite. As ever, not quite crossing the line, but toeing it.

"How's your lunch?" asked Sidney, sitting down. He reached out and took Hawkeye's wrist.

"Like an Army lunch. Tastes like chicken." A brief spike of the pulse there.

"It's beef," said Sidney.

Hawkeye gave him a martyred look. "I _know_."

Sidney laughed and let go of his wrist. "Well, Doctor, there's nothing wrong with your heart."

"Steady like shellfire," said Hawkeye. "Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom." He peered into Sidney's face. "You look tired."

Sidney shrugged. "I slept in the morning, like you."

Already he missed talking to Hawkeye as he was accustomed to, as a fellow doctor and an equal. But he told himself that the conversation was just like their poker games—bluffs and tactical lies from both sides. He hadn't slept, of course, but that was irrelevant.

Shaking his head, Hawkeye said, "Nice try, but you just came from some guy who thinks he's MacArthur. Has he started issuing ultimatums to you yet?"

"It's not an uncommon condition," said Sidney, checking his surprise. "Remember Captain Chandler?"

He was conscious of exhuming their shared past, and conscious also of the thin line he was walking. He couldn't do this with other patients, and he wasn't sure how much he did it to establish a rapport, to reintroduce reality, to comfort a man in pain—and how much to comfort himself.

"Jesus Christ?" asked Hawkeye. "He's a memorable guy. A few millennia worth of memorable."

Sidney nodded. "Although I have to say that's a more popular one than MacArthur. You wouldn't believe how many messiahs you've got running around Korea." After a moment, he said, "How did you know about my MacArthur patient?"

"The orderly," replied Hawkeye. "Brings the morning news with lunch. I would've tipped him if you'd left me… well, anything."

It had been upon Sidney's suggestion that, toward therapeutic ends, responsible patients were allowed to deliver the in-room meals. Now he made a mental note to impress upon them that the hospital's culture of absolute openness didn't extend past the end of therapy sessions.

Hawkeye winked at him and said, "You've got that paternal look. Don't send him to his room. I liked being part of the patient rumor mill, for once. I always wondered what the kids in post-op were saying about _me_."

Idly, trying to see his way back to Hawkeye's particular case, Sidney asked, "Are mine saying anything about me?"

"They're crazy about you." Sidney half-smiled, but Hawkeye didn't. He paused, then said in a lower, helpless, almost grudging voice, "No, really. They love you." He looked away, so that Sidney could see him in profile, lean and shadowed. After a while, he said, "Listen, Sidney, I'm sorry if last night I said anything… strange to you."

"Hawkeye," said Sidney, "I've known you, in the middle of a war zone, for three years. There's nothing you could say that would surprise me."

There was something challenging in Hawkeye's eyes when he looked back, an air of _Wanna bet?_ With the average patient, underlying that dare would be the hope that it was true: that Sidney would accept anything, understand anything. With Hawkeye, it was hard to tell if there was anything left to him but bluffs and bluster.

"Nothing," repeated Sidney firmly. For once it wasn't a lie. Father Mulcahy had seen it all, riding home on that bus with Hawkeye on the Fourth of July, and last night on the phone, Colonel Potter had told Sidney the whole story.

***

The next morning, a nurse brought Hawkeye to breakfast in the Ward D dining hall. Ward D, she explained when asked, was one of two psychiatric wards, where the ambulatory, physically healthy, nonviolent patients were housed. Hawkeye didn't ask what kinds of cases were housed in Ward E.

The four ward doctors ate in the dining hall at the same hour as the patients, at a separate table in the corner. In their midst Hawkeye could see Sidney, who offered him a smile when he came in. Hawkeye ignored it; he'd worked up a night's worth of resentment toward Sidney. Yesterday at ten p.m., he'd discovered that the walls were much thinner than he'd expected in a nuthouse. He could clearly hear the man in the next room, a concert of crying that rivaled Charles's records for length and breadth of sound, starting out _pianissimo_ around lights out and crescendoing to its climax around three a.m., then continuing _diminuendo_ until dawn. A saint would have been irritated by the man. Albert Schweitzer would have lost patience with him. Hawkeye had screamed at him for a while.

After breakfast, Sidney wandered through the crush, greeting patients as he went. When he arrived at Hawkeye's table, Hawkeye was the only one still seated, staring dourly at his toast and eggs.

"You looked pretty hostile when you came in," observed Sidney.

"Soldiers don't smile, fella," Hawkeye told a runny yolk.

"You know, if you don't eat…" said Sidney, trailing off to leave the rest to the imagination. _You'll be written up. You'll be force-fed. You'll be sent to Ward E._

"The body begins to devour itself," put in Hawkeye. "Beginning usually with liver and muscle glycogenolysis. Followed by consumption of fat deposits, and finally the protein in cell cytoplasm." He poked with his fork at the yolk, which—very much like a dying cell—was gradually losing all structural integrity. Warming to his theme, he continued, staccato and forceful: "Ketosis, increased nitrogen production, hypoglycemic shock. Patient may present with loose skin; lethargy; increased prominence of the ribcage, vertebrae, pelvis—"

"I was thinking," said Sidney, "that you might like to get out of your room for a few hours."

Hawkeye leaned back in the chair and studied Sidney, eyes narrowed.

"Tokyo? Paris? Geneva? I hear the weather's lovely in Switzerland this time of year. Kind of lukewarm. A neutral climate."

Sidney shook his head.

"Helsinki? Brussels?" Hawkeye paused, and his heart beat faster. "Ouijongbu?"

"The common room," said Sidney. Off Hawkeye's black look, he added, "It's not all bad news. There's always a poker game going on in there."

"I would've thought Crazy Eights," said Hawkeye, but he shoved away from the table and got to his feet. Anything was better than staring at his food until he began to see his face in it. When you look long into the eggs, the eggs also look into you.

In the light of day, fully peopled, the common room seemed much less sinister than it had the night before. Young men lounged in chairs, clustered around the radio, played low-stakes poker—in their blue bathrobes looking like nothing so much as a convention of premature retirees, or the passengers on a cruise ship.

People were playing cards when the Titanic went down, Hawkeye thought. The trappings of normality were suspect. _Et in Arcadia ego._

In the nearest corner of the room, a group of men crouched in a circle. The tableau was familiar, and Hawkeye recognized the game almost immediately. It was a scene out of childhood: playing marbles on the rocky ground of the schoolyard, the abrupt edge of the Maine wind like a whetstone, and that same low, competitive, avian chuckle of voices.

He rounded on Sidney, who—he was gratified to see—almost fell back a step at his vehemence.

"Oh, that's _clever_! Really subtle! I was just saying to BJ the other day, You know what I like about Sidney Freedman? He's _subtle_."

"I wish I knew what I'd done that's so clever," said Sidney. "What's the matter?"

Hawkeye pointed accusingly at the knot of men hunched around their chalk circle.

"Do you pay them to sit by the door and play all day, just in case you have visitors? When somebody loses all his marbles, is the penalty a straitjacket?"

"You're not exactly a visitor here," said Sidney calmly. He spared the men a glance. "It's a weekly game. I hear it's quite lucrative." His eyes returned to Hawkeye. "There's no need to be so suspicious. I haven't laid any traps. I don't check to see if you make pictures in your breakfast food."

Hawkeye smirked. "You might want to change that policy. I did a beautiful portrait of my mother in my eggs this morning."

"Sometimes a game of marbles is just a game of marbles." Sidney made as if to put a hand on Hawkeye's elbow, to steer him farther into the room, but stopped when Hawkeye shied away.

There was a time when Hawkeye could have believed that, but that was three years ago. In Korea, he knew, everything was symbolic, everything was veiled. A soldier wasn't a man but a military investment. Arable fields became minefields. Language had gone funny on him—crowded with abstractions and euphemisms, the kind of Orwellian shorthand that Frank Burns always loved—and in defiance he went funny on it.

He thought of a kid he'd treated last week who wouldn't stop talking about looking up after a blast and seeing a leg, a leg alone from the knee down, poised upright for an impossibly long time until finally it toppled like a tree. He was quite calm and rational; he talked about the leg as if it were a stage prop. Hawkeye understood. It was easier to talk about the leg as a stand-in. Much harder to accept—even to think—that it had come from the man next to him on the line, who had thrown himself on a Chinese grenade to save the rest of the squad.

"Hawkeye," said Sidney. "I wish you'd trust me on this."

Hawkeye smiled, because for once Sidney didn't have it right. Through everything, he trusted Sidney implicitly. It was himself he didn't trust. It was himself he kept at arm's length, sandbagged behind symbolism. It was himself he closed the door against.

***

Fleming had been at the hospital five days, and on paper he'd made startling progress. With consistent, gentle questioning, he'd come out of his shell and starting talking; once he started talking, he stopped being able to ignore his inconsistencies. His position began to erode. Occasionally, when caught off guard, he would respond to his own name.

"Do you want to talk about what happened before you came here?" asked Sidney.

It was his last session of the day, and they were sitting in Fleming's room, Fleming on his own bed and Sidney on his roommate's, who was squeezing in one last game of poker in the common room. Gilmore, who was treating the roommate, said he was making an obscene amount of money in those games, and there was something worryingly compulsive about it. But then that was to be expected. The man had been sent to them for his compulsive gambling—he had a tendency to dash out of his foxhole into enemy fire for no reason, offering his life as the pot.

Fleming leaned back, his head against the wall. At this angle his face was almost completely hidden, smudged with the deep shadow cast by the setting sun.

"Nothing," he said tiredly. "Really nothing."

Sidney believed him. Not only that he remembered nothing, but that there had been no traumatic incident that sent him over the edge. There rarely was. Holding off the Chinese at Seoul had been the last straw, probably, but he hadn't experienced anything extraordinarily horrible. He had just given up. He had said _Stop_ to the assault, to the whole tidal onrush of the war, and when it had refused, he had stopped instead.

He'd made a lot of progress. He knew his own history again, and he was starting to know his name. He'd given up his affected style of speech. And, Sidney thought, looking at his exhausted eyes and the facial twitch that he'd developed as the illusion fell away, he should never go into combat again. He wasn't made for it. Being MacArthur was much less of a charade than being a soldier had ever been.

Sidney had already started the process to take him off active duty. He'd advised Fleming's commander of his evaluation. Once that was approved, they could move on to the medical board, who would—if Sidney got his way—allow Fleming to be evacuated.

"Fleming," Sidney said quietly. Fleming looked up with involuntary swiftness. Still he seemed almost to resist his own identity, but to be drawn along with it magnetically. "Do you know where you are now?"

Fleming's face twitched again, so violently that his whole head moved in a sideways jerk. Sidney thought, _Please._ They couldn't go forward if Fleming couldn't say it. If he was allowed to leave without ever knowing what he left, he would never get this part of himself back. It would be too easy a failure—for both of them.

Fleming cleared his throat. The word seemed to stick there, and he gaped for a moment, trying to breathe around it.

Finally, he said, "Korea."

Warmth flooded Sidney's face, but he couldn't tell if it was relief or something more complicated, like shame.

"That's right," he said.

Fleming leaned forward, his face passing through the light from the window, a pale flash like a fish's belly. He bent his head toward Sidney.

"That doesn't make sense," said Fleming, in a low, secret voice overtaken by panic.

"Why?" Sidney asked. The eternal question. He was asking it of all of them, of Hawkeye and of Morelli, of the men who broke the rules and the men who simply broke down—because he couldn't get an answer from the war itself. He had asked it of Caleb this afternoon, preparing to see Fleming: "Why MacArthur?" he had asked. "All he wants is to not be himself. It doesn't have anything to do with rank. Anyone else would have done. Why did he choose MacArthur?"

Caleb had shrugged and offered lightly, "They're both good Scotsmen?" Sidney had given him a narrow look, and he'd said, "I'm sorry. I wish I could help you."

Now Fleming leaned in even closer, his eyes distant and unfocused, the look of a man listening to some other frequency entirely. Listening to the growing whisper inside his skull that knew all the horrible things he might have seen, might have done. He held out his hand to Sidney, palm up, in an appeal.

" _Because they already sent me home_ ," he whispered.

In months to come, when he thought back on Korea, this was what Sidney would most often remember. The view from the door as he left at the end of their hour: a man sitting twitching in the dusk. What he said to Hawkeye when he arrived in the jeep: _the dark night of the soul_. What Caleb said, grinning painfully: _I'm sorry. I wish I could help you._

At home, before the war, his job had been to transform pain. Now he could only give it back.

***

"What's the last thing you remember?" asked Sidney conversationally.

It was late morning, around the time that Hawkeye would usually be waking up, groggy and heat-flushed, after a late-night OR session. Instead he was safely miles behind the lines, with a ceiling fan going full force in his room all day long, and he hated himself for it. They were forty-five minutes into a session that, like all the others, never got much farther than Hawkeye's general feelings about the war and his intense dislike for hospital lunchmeats. If anyone asked Hawkeye—and no one ever did—he felt that Sidney had no right to sound that conversational.

Hawkeye squinted at nothing in particular. After a thoughtful silence, he came out with "You, asking me the last thing I remember."

Sidney didn't blink. Sidney was eerie that way.

"I mean before you woke up in the jeep outside the hospital."

"I've told you," said Hawkeye. "The Fourth of July. Getting back to camp that night. Going to bed." He smirked. "Memory lapses are no mystery, Sidney; I live in a tent with a built-in distillery."

"Hmm," said Sidney. "You remember getting back to camp? What did you do?"

Hawkeye sighed. "Let me demonstrate for you." He flung himself face down on the bed. Into the pillow, he ground out, "I. Went. To. Bed. As usual."

"See, that's what gets me," said Sidney. "'As usual.' I mean, do you actually remember going to bed, or do you _assume_ you went to bed because that's the routine?"

Hawkeye lifted his face. Something brushed across the back of his thoughts, like the flutter of wings. He shook his head, opened his eyes wide, and said, "Are you sure you aren't here to _make_ people crazy? Because that's what the end result of all this questioning is. You know what else I assume? That I exist, that I'm alive and sentient and not just the victim of some elaborate deception of the man behind the curtain, or a dream of God's, or a nightmare of Eisenhower's."

"Clever," said Sidney, without inflection. "Do you remember the ride home on the bus, before that?"

"Uneventful," said Hawkeye. It was: in his mind's eye he saw it as a flat plain, uninterrupted by the vertiginous peaks of happenstance.

"All right," said Sidney.

That seemed too easy. Suddenly Hawkeye suspected that Sidney was laying traps somewhere, traps that they would casually meander back into. Hawkeye tried to locate them, and was reminded of BJ's first day in Korea, the two of them standing by the side of the road, watching Radar weave across a minefield with a bloody girl cradled in his arms. He missed Radar, and inexplicably also the little girl whom they later treated back in camp. He missed all the children of this war who went away.

"What's the last thing you remember with any specificity?" asked Sidney. "That's what we're trying to get at. Not the routines, not the non-events."

"The beach," said Hawkeye. "Potter told you about the beach?"

"I'd like you to tell me about it."

"It was beautiful," said Hawkeye. "I mean, not relatively, comparatively, in-the-middle-of-a-war-zone beautiful. Just beautiful."

"Mmm-hmm," said Sidney. "Why? Specifically? You're smiling—what are you seeing?"

Hawkeye touched his face and was surprised to find that he was in fact smiling. He saw that Sidney didn't miss the gesture, or its significance.

"Oh… people playing baseball. Nurses running the bases. _Beautiful_ , like I said. Blue smoke drifting off the grill—we had somebody cooking hamburgers, real hamburgers. Father Mulcahy digging along the shore, making sand cathedrals probably." Wistfully, he added, "BJ running past him, through the surf. Uh, and then packing up at the end, watching the sun set over the ocean." He paused, remembering that moment of orange stillness, the tongue of high tide lapping toward them, the seagulls silhouetted against the water as they swarmed in, clucking, to retake the beach. His heart was racing—with delight or dread, he couldn't tell.

"Where are you in all this?" asked Sidney.

"Me?" Hawkeye had to think about it. "Mingling. Impressing nurses. Eating, drinking, and being merry." Sidney gave him a look, and he said, "Oh, right, _specifics_. We played volleyball at one point. BJ's team won, but only because he's a dirty cheater. Did you know that he grew that mustache to hide cards in? So… there was that, we played volleyball, BJ cheated, I gave him what for. We wrestled over it." He stopped. "Through the net."

"Yes?" Sidney was asking keenly, but Hawkeye couldn't answer.

He remembered wrestling with BJ through the net, touching him but not really touching, grappling for purchase. And he remembered what he forgot the night he arrived here: the mask sliding over his patient's face in the OR, and the way it felt when he grabbed the anesthetist's arm and demanded, What are you doing to him? His hand clutching the man's arm, shape but no sensation, the two of them separated by his rubber glove like an extra skin. Skin within skin, suffocating him. There was no way out of himself.

What the hell's going on over there, Pierce? Potter barked, from far away. Hawkeye said, This man—this man's trying to smother my patient— but all he could feel was himself, sealed in. Potter looked at BJ, and BJ looked at Mulcahy, hovering over Hawkeye's shoulder, and then Potter said, Pierce, you're on stand-down. That's it. Father, show him out.

In the Swamp he watched Mulcahy's back recede through the mesh wall, and then he closed his eyes and didn't think for a long time. When he opened his eyes, he was bored—more than bored, he was blank, cut off and quarantined from his own past. He couldn't remember what he'd had for dinner last night. He rolled off his bed and went to the other side of the tent, where he scanned Charles's book collection. Charles wouldn't mind. After all, Margaret borrowed books from him all the time, and Hawkeye felt he'd always been prettier than Margaret anyway. He chose a slim volume and tried to read. He seemed to know it all already.

When he came to again, it was dark, and BJ was kneeling beside him. You should take off your scrubs, said BJ, without preamble, as if continuing an earlier conversation. Hawkeye, still wearing the shield of his mask, said, Not until you buy me dinner. BJ did something with his mouth that wasn't really a smile and said, Listen, sailor, I'll do you one better: if you take off your scrubs, I'll buy you a drink. That seemed reasonable to Hawkeye, so he stood up and said, Deal. Just let me hit the powder room and we'll make a night of it.

BJ let him go, and he stumbled across the compound to the enlisted men's latrine. If anyone had asked, he wouldn't have known that he had the right to use the officers'; he wouldn't have known that he was a captain in the United States Army. Inside, he knelt on the dingy floor and dry-heaved. It disappointed him. He really was curious about what he'd had for dinner last night. Then he walked out, took a jeep from the motor pool, and went to buy a drink for BJ.

When he came to again—like a dream within a dream, an endless sequence of awakenings with no end in sight—he was sitting against the half-ruined wall of the officers' club, BJ looking down at him. Did you get your drink? Hawkeye asked, and BJ said, You could have _killed_ someone.

I did, said Hawkeye.

BJ flinched and sat down beside him, his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. He put an arm around Hawkeye, and then they were shaking together. BJ dropped his head onto Hawkeye's shoulder and said, Oh shit, Hawk. Hawkeye had hardly ever heard him swear, couldn't imagine what would make him do it, and so he tenderly put a hand on the back of BJ's head. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit, said BJ, rhythmic as a song, and Hawkeye finished for him: Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Then there was another jeep, and a man who leaned over the door and said, Captain Pierce? You wanna come with me? Hawkeye wanted to say, snidely, that his mother had told him never to get into a stranger's car, but "my mother" stuck in his throat and he sat there mortified, stammering the Ms. BJ helped him to his feet. Potter was there, and Mulcahy, everyone speaking at once—

I'll have Major Freedman call you, sir—

You do what you can, son—

I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him—

And BJ, close and far away, fingers undoing Hawkeye's mask, barely touching him through the fabric:

You need to take off your scrubs, Hawkeye.

Not until you buy me dinner.

His past continuously crumbled under him, sand eroding beneath the surf. Already he had forgotten that he'd made the same joke three hours earlier.

" _Hawkeye_ ," Sidney said.

Hawkeye opened his eyes. He was still lying on the cot, propped up on his elbows, but Sidney had moved. He was sitting on the mattress. Hawkeye almost reached out to touch him, to reestablish the connection. Then he remembered that this wasn't BJ, that it was not July 5th but July 11th.

"What happened?" asked Sidney. Hawkeye knew better than to underestimate him. Sidney wasn't asking what had just happened; he was asking what had happened after the beach.

"I don't want to talk about it," Hawkeye said.

"We're going to have to talk about it," said Sidney. "That's why we're here."

Hawkeye put his face back in the pillow. "I didn't get any sleep last night. That guy next door's still conducting the evening shell-shock symphony. I don't want to talk about it _now_."

He heard Sidney sigh.

"All right, you get a twenty-four-hour reprieve. But we're coming back to this tomorrow." A hand rested briefly on his back. "If you need anything, you call for the orderly. He'll get me." Sidney's hand went away. Sidney went away.

As soon as he heard the door close, Hawkeye sat bolt upright on the bed. Being face down in the pillow made him lightheaded: lack of oxygen to the brain. He sat leaning against the wall, reminding himself over and over that he wasn't still slumped on the ground at the 4077th, unglued in time.

After a while he looked down. It was only then, as he stared at his hands, that they began to shake. Then he was trembling all over, chilled, as if he'd been frozen so long that it took a moment of warmth to remind him how cold he was. He was filled with elemental, animal terror, thinking of the thaw.

***

It was four days after he'd contacted Fleming's commander when Sidney finally sat down to start on the medical-board paperwork. If all went well, he could have Fleming evaluated within the week, and stateside not long after. Looking at the in-patient treatment record that the board would read, Sidney couldn't imagine that they wouldn't let him go. All he had to do was go through the motions of justifying the recommendation.

Sidney put down his pen and leaned back in his chair, putting a hand across his eyes to shade them from the lamplight. Yesterday Hawkeye had laughed over Fleming. He could be remarkably cruel about his fellow patients, especially Fleming and Morelli, whose spats he mocked with delight. It was understandable: he was trying to orient himself in an impossible middle ground, where he was no longer allowed to be a doctor but couldn't accept being a patient.

In session yesterday, Hawkeye had looked out his window and observed that "General MacArthur" was out on the lawn. There was an edge to his voice when he said, "If you do a good job on him, they could probably get you promoted."

Sidney thought there was little danger of that, and not just because there wasn't anywhere higher than ward commander for a psychiatrist to go here.

If he could be sure he was making progress with Hawkeye, this failure with Fleming might be bearable. But even as he gradually revealed more of the bus story, Hawkeye didn't seem to be doing any better emotionally. He was irritable and hostile, his jokes barbed and his slights about "real doctors" loaded.

It was possible that, in the first flush of distress at Hawkeye's arrival, Sidney had made a mistake in taking the case himself. Their personal relationship complicated the professional one. At the 4077th it had been easier to ignore Sidney's occasional, casual shift into Dr. Freedman; after all, ad hoc therapy at the front was common even among the laity. Here, in the hospital—"your hospital," Hawkeye had recognized almost immediately—the roles were formalized. It would be natural to resent that.

He could have given Hawkeye to one of the other doctors. Hawkeye would like Caleb, whose steadfast, humorous calm would remind him of BJ. Or there was Gilmore, to whom Hawkeye might relate. They were both a little crazy even at their best, but productively and brilliantly so.

But in the end there hadn't really been another option. After all, BJ himself hadn't been able to do anything for Hawkeye, had only been able to help him out of his mask before the jeep took him away. And Hawkeye clearly hadn't been to help himself. There was no one else for it but Sidney, and he fought against that fact even as he was strangely, selfishly touched by it.

Caleb's knock on the open door brought him upright in his seat, but not before Caleb saw him with his hand across his face.

"How goes it?" asked Caleb, a little wary.

Sidney smiled for his sake. "Trying to get Fleming out of the clutches of the medical board."

Caleb came in, closed the door behind him, and sat in the chair on the other side of the desk.

"If you say unfit for duty, he's back in CONUS like that." Caleb snapped his fingers. "You know that. That's not what's bothering you."

"Thanks for the diagnosis," said Sidney. He sighed and gestured at the sheaf of forms. "Just a mid-war crisis, I guess. I keep worrying that I'm doing him a disservice, trying to help him back to sanity in a world insane enough to allow this kind of war. Isn't that just making him maladjusted? Am I encouraging a much more dangerous delusion? Wouldn't he be happier—more sheltered—believing himself to be a man who escaped the war in 1951? What do _those_ thoughts mean, Doctor?"

Caleb looked at him, graciously ignoring the misdirected anger. "I think it means that if you weren't my CO, I'd order you to take some R&R."

"Privilege of rank," said Sidney. "I'm sorry. But I'm serious, Caleb. It worries me."

"You're talking about sending him back to 42nd Street, not to Hill 255," said Caleb. "I understand—you _know_ I understand the characteristic conflict here. Medicine tells us to make them saner; the Army tells us make them voluntarily go back to a war zone. I'm sure your Captain Pierce knows all about that dilemma." Sidney shifted in his chair. He didn't want to talk about Hawkeye. He went to sleep thinking about Hawkeye, dreamed of their conversations, and woke up to yet another session. "But for God's sake, Sid, you get to be the good guy here, so why don't you savor it? All right, you didn't fix him all the way. But you're making it so that someone else can, back in the real world."

"Ah," said Sidney, smiling at a private joke. "Back in the world without war."

As he said it he had a fleeting, incongruous memory of Captain Chandler, two years ago at the 4077th. During Chandler's stay, post-op was abuzz with rumors and speculation about him. Whenever Sidney joined in, he found himself startled by a sense that he was speaking in a different dialect. When he said the words—"Jesus Christ," our patient Jesus Christ—he knew that they didn't mean quite the same thing to him as they did to everyone else. It had nothing to do with conscious belief (certainly Hawkeye, for one, had no definable faith); it was all reflex, childhood context. The world without war, Jesus Christ: stories that other people believed. Good Jew that he was, Sidney had his doubts that anyone was coming to save them.

"Do you know what 'Caleb' means?" Sidney asked.

Caleb was looking at him strangely. He wondered how long he'd been silent, smiling at the punch line.

"No idea," said Caleb. "My parents thought I was going to be a girl, so I was supposed to be Catherine. 'Caleb' was a last-minute choice in the delivery room."

"It's from the Hebrew," Sidney said. "Meaning 'faithful.' It suits you."

"What does 'Sidney' mean?" asked Caleb, willfully dense.

"I have no idea," said Sidney. "Which suits me."

Resignedly, he looked down at the medical-board form. After a moment, he wrote "Separation recommended" on the crucial line and signed his name.

"There it is," he said. "You think they'll give _him_ a ticker-tape parade?"

Caleb sighed. "What you're doing for Fleming—it's a gift. You've started giving him back his life, his real life. And now you're sending him home."

Sidney considered the form, its incoherent military jargon and its meaningless promises. He tried to imagine Fleming in a parade, but all he could envision were the years of treatment, the laborious climb back to an awareness that could bring no comfort.

"I know," said Sidney. "It's just that before I got my hands on him, he'd already sent himself home. Better than I ever could."

***

Hawkeye's last session hadn't really been a planned session at all. Sidney had snuck up on him over a game of cards, right there in the middle of the common room in front of God, Truman, and everyone, and Hawkeye hadn't realized what was happening until suddenly he was talking about chickens, and Sidney had leaned forward and said questioningly, "Chickens take the bus." And there it was. There had been a chicken on the bus, and Sidney had known it as soon as Hawkeye did, and it all seemed deeply, deeply unfair.

So when Sidney knocked on the door the next morning, like a formal visitor, it was a relief. Hawkeye knew where he stood.

"Enter!" he caroled. He picked up one of the books on the side table, from a stack that had been left by the room's last occupant. When Sidney opened the door, he already looked deeply engrossed.

"Am I disturbing anything?" asked Sidney, and proceeded to come straight in without waiting for an answer.

Hawkeye made a show of scrutinizing the room, as though he thought there might be a nurse hidden in a corner. "Nope, nobody here but us chickens." He smiled widely. "Little joke."

"Very little," observed Sidney, but gave him a genuine smile in return. "Even being conscious enough to joke about it is an improvement."

"Hmm," said Hawkeye, unconvinced. He lifted the book again, putting it between him and Sidney.

"Are you enjoying that?"

"More than what I usually do at this time of day," said Hawkeye.

"That's funny," said Sidney. He took hold of the book and turned it around so that Hawkeye could see the front cover. Apparently he was reading _Let Us Die to Make Men Free: The Latter-Day Crusade in Korea_.

"Ah," said Hawkeye.

"Your predecessor was something of a… fringe religious enthusiast," said Sidney. To his credit, he didn't even snicker. "He also felt that Syngman Rhee was the Second Coming. And that Buddhist monks were poisoning his food." And then, master of the whiplash-inducing subject change that he was, he asked, "Do you want to go back to the bus today?"

"Not especially," said Hawkeye. For a moment he thought Sidney was asking if he wanted, physically, to go back. He was surprised by how hard his heart was beating.

Sidney took his customary place on the opposite bed. Agreeably, he said, "All right. Why don't we try something new, then? Why don't we talk about the fifth of July? The day after."

"The day I went for a joyride, you mean," observed Hawkeye caustically.

Sidney shrugged. "Have you remembered anything new about it? Try working backward: do you remember coming here?"

Hawkeye was silent for a moment. The memory of it softened him: Sidney appearing out of the darkness with his calmly familiar voice, allowing himself to be embraced. The shape and solidity of another human being in Hawkeye's arms, the first real thing he had touched all day.

"Yes," Hawkeye said. His voice cracked on the word, and he cleared his throat. "I remember that."

"Do you remember leaving the 4077th?"

BJ. He remembered BJ, the hair on the back of his neck fuzzy like static, like a signal stopped on the radio. BJ was singing—no. BJ was saying _Oh shit_ over and over, his mouth in Hawkeye's shoulder, and Hawkeye sang to him comfortingly, like a lullaby, _Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream_.

They were singing that on the bus. He knew that now.

"Yes," said Hawkeye again.

There was something incantatory about this exchange. He knew that Sidney had hypnotized patients before, had seen him do it at the 4077th with a medic who broke down after his brother died in combat. For the first time he understood how those patients felt, how they burrowed away from the pain and how Sidney like a cruel midwife dragged them back into it.

Sidney leaned forward, elbows on knees. "All right. Let's fill in the blank of the rest of the day, shall we?"

Hawkeye hesitated. He didn't want to say it, especially to Sidney, against whom the slow tide of resentment was swelling again. But now that it had started, he didn't know how to stop it.

"We were in the OR." He saw Sidney look at him searchingly and said, with a touch of belligerence, "No, I don't remember waking up. I don't remember going to sleep the night before. _This_ is what I remember. We were in the OR, everything was going fine, except when they rolled in my third patient it was suddenly like he was my three hundredth. That floating kind of tiredness. He was a redhead, he looked underage, and he had a gut wound. The anesthetist tried to put the mask over his face, and I—" He stopped, trying to understand.

"Go on," said Sidney. "What did you think?"

"I didn't think anything. I—it was beyond thinking. I just felt that if that mask went on, if I couldn't see his face any more, then he'd be dead. It was like the way a kid thinks that if he covers his face, then you won't be able to see him. That kind of… infantile logic."

"That was when Colonel Potter sent you out," said Sidney.

"Yes. I'm sure he told you that part of the story." Hawkeye looked at Sidney and wondered, for the first time, how much Potter _had_ told him. If maybe Potter and Sidney knew more than he did. It made his skin crawl.

"What then?"

"I went back to the Swamp. I slept for a while." He paused, furrowing his brow. "No, wait. I was awake at some point. I must've been, because I went over to Charles's side of the Swamp and took a book. _Macbeth_."

Sidney raised an eyebrow. "Interesting choice. So you read some Shakespeare. And then?"

Hawkeye was only half-listening, snagged on that moment. "I don't remember really reading it, is the funny thing. I was sitting on Charles's bunk with it open on my lap, but I wasn't turning the pages. I'd read it before, you know. Actually I acted in it." His eyes snapped back to Sidney; he'd almost forgotten that he wasn't alone. "You remember that time you came down and hypnotized the medic with amnesia?"

Sidney nodded. "Jerry, right? He ended up making a full recovery. He went back to the front."

Hawkeye made a dismissive noise; he was unimpressed. "Remember I lied about having played Hamlet? Well, this is true: when I was a kid, my dad was friends with a director at our community theater. One season they were doing _Macbeth_ , and the kid they had playing Macduff's son got sick two days before opening night. As a favor to the director, my dad talked me into filling in." Hawkeye licked his lips, closed his eyes. "That was… not long after my mom died, so I guess he wanted me to get involved in something besides myself. I hated him for it."

"Why?" asked Sidney. "The lines were difficult to learn?"

"Hardly. I only spoke in one scene. The stupidest scene in the whole play. I hated him for putting me through that."

"Oh, yes?" Sidney steepled his hands. "What happened in your scene?"

And Hawkeye hated him, too, even as he recognized that conflating his therapist with his father (whom he didn't even hate) was the most obvious psychological pitfall in the book. He hated Sidney because Sidney had to have read _Macbeth_ , because he had known "Hurry up, please, it's time" and he knew this, because he seemed sometimes to know everything and to force you back into knowing it, too.

"My mother and I have a conversation," said Hawkeye. "The murderers sent by Macbeth come barging in—I forget why they wanted to kill us, I forget why so many people had to die—and I say something impertinent to one of them. They stab me, and I say—this line, it was so ridiculous—" He tried to laugh and when he heard the sound he made, he was shocked, because it was barely a laugh at all. When he started to speak again, he'd lost the manic momentum he needed. "I say, 'He has killed me, Mother.'"

He opened his eyes and looked at Sidney, too afraid to move. There was a long, long silence.

"You seem upset," Sidney said.

Hawkeye concentrated on not trembling, on not disrupting his fragile balance. He wondered if this was how kids on the operating table felt, with shrapnel rattling around their insides. He didn't want this in him.

At length, he said, "I'm allergic to Scotsmen. Like MacArthur."

Sidney smiled slightly, but wasn't diverted. "You know what I've noticed? That besides your chicken fixation, you seem to be talking a lot about your mother."

"I never talk about my mother," Hawkeye said stiffly.

"No, not usually. I'd heard a lot about your father before, but nothing about her. But this week—well, when you came in, you told the nurse on duty that you have your mother's eyes. In the dining hall, you told me you'd made a portrait of her in your eggs. And today you mentioned her death. I didn't even know she had died."

"Sidney," Hawkeye said, "I know what you're thinking, and for once you're wrong. I do not want to sleep with my mother." He marveled at the layers upon layers: the mock-solemn façade over the humor over the terror.

"And then there's your bringing up _Macbeth_." Sidney's tone was almost professorial. "There are a lot of interesting mothers in that play, wouldn't you say? Macduff was prematurely ripped from his mother's womb. Macduff's wife watches her son die before her eyes. And of course the most famous: Lady Macbeth, the anti-mother. What is it she says about her hypothetical baby?"

"Stop it, Sid," Hawkeye said in a choked voice. He was breathing hard. Of course he knew; he'd gotten that entire play by heart at the age of ten, already cursed with a doctor's skill for memorization. _I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash'd the brains out…._

When he had regained a small measure of composure, he said desperately, "Maybe it doesn't mean anything. A wise man once told me that sometimes a game of marbles is just a game of marbles."

"I don't think it is, in this case." Sidney's gaze was kind but firm. "We have to talk about this."

Hawkeye put his face in his hands and said, "I'm so tired of talking. I've spent the whole war talking."

"I know." In a moment the mattress dipped as Sidney moved to sit beside him. "It's hard to remember."

"You have _no idea_ ," Hawkeye said, startled by his own vehemence, and by his fierce new understanding of what it meant to be a patient. Defending his pain, advocating for it. "It's like trying to remember a dream, except twice as hard because it felt like a dream even while it was happening. It makes you doubt that anything's real." ( _Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily_ , he thought.) "It makes you wonder if going home is literally going to be a wakeup, and whether anyone will believe you when you try to talk about the war."

Sidney's hand was on his shoulder.

"And that frightens you—the possibility that you'll go home and be alone with this."

"Yes," said Hawkeye, and then, rebutting himself, "No. I mean, it does, but that's not the main fear." He sighed and scrubbed his face vigorously with his hands, as if he could take it off, step out of himself and start over. "Mostly it's the niggling suspicion that it's not real, that I'm just telling myself horror stories. That's what frightens me. Because what kind of person could dream up something like this?"

***

It was a quarter of ten on the night of July 27th, more than twenty-four hours after Sidney had arrived at the 4077th. Almost two weeks had passed since Hawkeye had his breakthrough at the hospital, and he'd been out for just over a week. Yesterday Potter had called Sidney in after Hawkeye drove a tank through the compound, which on the phone had sounded a little too much like driving a jeep through the wall of the officers' club. As it turned out, though, there had been a perfectly rational explanation. As rational as you were going to get in Korea, anyway.

And yet Sidney was still here. He sat in the scrub room adjoining the OR, taking a brief break from the action. On the radio they were talking about Vietnam, but Sidney was listening to the bustle on the other side of the curtain, the noise of people picking up after this war.

Hawkeye came in abruptly, slinging off his gloves. Sidney couldn't gauge his expression until he took off his mask: peeved, a little pale, but not alarming.

"You all right?" asked Sidney.

"Fine," Hawkeye said shortly. "Potter told me to take five. I snapped a little at a nurse, apparently." He blew out a long breath and seemed to reflect on this. "I guess I did. I guess I've been doing a lot of snapping lately."

"It'll take a while to readjust," said Sidney. "Don't over-think it. They're just trying to help."

"I know." Hawkeye sat down on the bench next to him and gave him an appraising look. "This isn't going to be one of those conversations that accidentally become sessions, is it?"

Sidney laughed. "Not for you," he said.

Hawkeye raised an eyebrow. "Is there something _you_ wanted to talk about?"

Yesterday he'd told Hawkeye that it made you a better doctor to learn you weren't infallible. It made empathy easier. Now he wondered if that was really true, or if maybe it was only true for doctors of the body. Expressing his doubts—doubts about the efficacy and the ethics of his role here, doubts about the efficacy and the ethics of the war itself—did nothing to help his patients. And yet he was compelled to say, in a moment of weakness, here in the last hour before the armistice made them obsolete:

"I just wanted to make sure you were doing better." He paused. "That I helped."

Incomprehension showed in Hawkeye's face. "Sidney, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a doctor again. Three weeks ago, I was a menace in the OR."

Sidney shrugged that off. "I'm not talking about the practical side. I came because I wanted to know—would it have been easier for you, if I hadn't made you fit for a war zone again? If you'd been able to go on believing that woman killed her chicken, not her child?"

"Ahh," said Hawkeye. "I thought you didn't approve of existential questions." There was a satisfied note in his voice that was transparent to Sidney. Order had been restored to Hawkeye's world; he wasn't inalterably the patient any longer.

"I approve of asking them," said Sidney. "I'm just no good at answering them."

Hawkeye tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. When he looked down again, he seemed to have lit on the right reply. A strange, small smile spread across his face.

"It would've been easier," he said. "It would also have been chickening out."

Sidney smiled back at him with one side of his mouth, one side of his heart. "I'll try to keep that in mind."

"Listen," said Hawkeye, "now that I'm allowed to ask questions again, can I take advantage of this rare opportunity? Why did you become a doctor?"

Sidney looked at him for a while. Finally, he said, "Oh, for the same reason as you, I suppose."

Hawkeye cocked his head questioningly. The sweep of Sidney's arm took in the makeshift scrub room, the dingy curtain cordoning them off from the sight of the OR but not its smells and sounds. And beyond it, still visible to both of them, the hospital room where he and Hawkeye had spent most of the month together: the bare walls, the single light, the two beds, the window with its bolted-down shield of chain-link wire.

"The glamour," Sidney said, and was gratified to get a real, startled "A-ha" in response. It was a characteristic laugh of Hawkeye's, the noise of epiphany applied to amusement. It had always struck Sidney as odd, since laughter for Hawkeye was usually a way of deflecting revelations, refusing to face them squarely.

Before Hawkeye could press him further, the curtain jerked back and BJ stuck his head in.

"Hawk? We need you. We're getting more wounded soon." Only then did he notice Sidney, and his grin was genuine, although not without a flicker of reservation behind those careful eyes of his. "Oh, hey, Sidney. Didn't realize you were still here." He studiously didn't look back at Hawkeye. "Everything okay?"

"Fine," said Hawkeye, a little too loudly. Sidney winced, and said a quick prayer to no one in particular that these two could work this out before they left: that Hawkeye could forgive BJ for leaving, and that BJ could forgive Hawkeye for needing more than he could give. "I'm just giving Sidney some free therapy. Business as usual, no need to worry."

BJ's smile had gone a little fixed at Hawkeye's tone, but still he looked at Sidney with real warmth. "Oh, I don't. He's the sanest person in this country."

Dryly, Sidney observed, "That's like saying, 'He's the most civic-minded person in this prison.'"

BJ chuckled, spared Hawkeye an expectant glance, and ducked back out.

Hawkeye made an indeterminate noise. When Sidney looked at him, he was sitting with his hands together in his lap, his face tilted down.

"You know what you said back in the hospital?" Hawkeye asked, not making eye contact. "About how I was harping on my mother? You were right. I've been thinking about her a lot lately." He inhaled, exhaled. "When she died, I was too young to realize what was happening. I never really got to say goodbye."

Sidney considered his words. "Hawkeye. He'll say it when he's ready."

Hawkeye smiled wistfully at his hands and said, "I'm just not sure he'll be ready in time."

"I hope he will," said Sidney, and heard Caleb's voice saying again: _I'm sorry. I wish I could help you._ He was tired of hoping fruitlessly, of feigning faith. He never seemed to be able to offer enough.

He thought of Fleming. They'd heard that the medical-board ruling went in his favor and he'd gone home, but Sidney still couldn't imagine what that meant. All that he could conjure up was the morning that they'd packed Fleming off to the board. It was the day after Hawkeye's release, and Sidney couldn't help being depressed as he walked yet another young man—both of them were still young, hard as that was to believe—down the corridor and out the door. As he washed his hands of them. Fleming had stopped beside his jeep and turned, stiff and awkward, to snap off a salute. Sidney, knowing Fleming's intense unmilitariness, was touched.

"You know what they say," Fleming had said. "Old soldiers never die."

He'd long since abandoned all traces of an imitative voice, but Sidney had recognized the reference anyway. MacArthur's Congressional address.

"They just fade away," Sidney had finished, returning the salute. Fleming had nodded, blinked rapidly, and gotten into the jeep. Sidney had watched it fade away.

Hawkeye got heavily to his feet. Picking up a fresh mask and pair of gloves, he glanced back over his shoulder.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends," he said. "You coming?"

"In a minute," said Sidney, and gave him an encouraging smile as he went out.

He sat listening as Hawkeye rejoined the war effort. Looking around the drab scrub room, he laughed. Yes: he'd joined for the glamour of the profession. Alone, he closed his eyes and thought of 1945. At the end of World War Two he'd been entering his final year of med school, fascinated but floundering for a specialty. That fall, Columbia's campus had been flooded with young men taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, but Sidney had no real contact with veterans until he went back to his childhood home for Rosh Hashanah. His cousin Adam had enlisted early, eager to serve both his country and his faith; on April 29th, 1945, his unit had assisted in the liberation of the camp at Dachau.

Sidney remembered Adam as a rowdy boy of thirteen, organizing games of hide-and-seek at family gatherings. That fall, he was a taciturn, rail-thin man with an unseeing stare, who turned away food and retreated into the den to avoid the postprandial family gossip session. Sidney had followed and sat the night with him, watching the darkness until the morning came. Adam never said a word. He disappeared in 1946 and didn't write to anyone.

Before that year, all Sidney knew of psychiatry was what little he'd gleaned about Freud, the unconscious, the hyper-aggressive id, the so-called "talking cure." That was enough. He went back to school, half-lived in the library, finished his final year, enrolled in analysis, and went into psychiatric residency. He was drafted almost as soon as he got out, and by October of 1950 he was in Korea, in the first days of this newest war, hoping he could work the miracle of making men talk.

He would go home, he knew. He would start a practice. He would track down Fleming in the States and consult with his new doctors. He would keep in touch with Hawkeye, meet him at medical conferences, help him through. He would try again. He would not be naïve enough to hope for miracles—no surcease from pain, no permanent peace.

He would simply do his job better. Back in the world, where the morning brought no wakeup, where war never ended.

A minute later, he opened his eyes. He stood, he drew back the curtain, and he went to help.

Ten minutes later, the war ended.

***

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "The Dawn Don't Rescue Me No More"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1659878) by [Makoyi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makoyi/pseuds/Makoyi)




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